> system does not scale to any transaction quantity larger than that of a single Costco or a large flea market.

IT DOESN'T HAVE TO! That is why I am ignoring it.

Systems that enable trustless transactions do not need to be Universal to be useful. Even if blockchains did only one transaction per minute, they would be useful - it's just that we would have to make accept a bigger trade-off in regards on what must go off-chain.

Understand this: blockchains are only needed as the settlement layer between parties that do not trust each other. This means that is not every transaction that needs to happen on-chain. If you trust a part of the group that you do business with, you don't need blockchain, you don't need layer-2, you don't need even a fucking bank account. For peers that do trust each other, transactions can be registered even on a A5 notepad or a excel spreadsheet if you want to get fancy. For local markets, paper IOUs are absolutely fine.

When you say "does not work at scale", your implied reasoning is "it does not work at every scale". You are thinking that the technology is only usable if it is universal and satisfies all scales: from the hyper-local to the municipal, provincial, national, global.

Your mistake is to think that a system is good if it is universal and all-encompassing. That truth is that Universality is not a requirement. Blockchain enthusiasts/developers are all accepting the limitations of the current technology and how fully-trustless transactions are too costly to be usable at anything but the national/global dimensions. The work is then to figure out ways to (1)increase the current limits so that more trustless transactions can happen in the lower levels and (2) know when (and how much!) trust inherit to the lower levels can be introduced to the higher ones as a way to make the system more performant.

The more progress is made in these areas, the better it will be for the overall system and the less it will be required for people to rely on trusted parties.

Let me repeat: systems that enable trustless transactions do not need to be universal to be useful.

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Now, a separate section to highlight what I mean about your ignorance based on a privileged position:

> if someone's charging you 2% per month for a loan, that's likely because lending to you is incredibly risky

No. That is simply not true. Banks in Brazil are notoriously known for having one of the largest spreads between what they get from the SELIC (the Central Bank's rate) and the average rates for retail. Retail banks have profitability rates that were unmatched by any other country. Until a few years ago, they were offering "co-signed loans" of ~1%/month to pensioners and public servants. Absolute zero risk, and these were touted as low rates to increase credit in Brazil.

(Something that I forgot to mention when you were talking about how Visanet has low rates in Europe: Direct debit cards - zero risk! - charge ~1.9% of the transaction value. Some of them charge a little bit less, but put a sizeable monthly rate on top of it.)

> Transferwise

Right, tell that to an Argentinean and see his face of horror when he needs to find out if he is going to receive the official, the blue or the black rate. Tell that to a Brazilian and they will tell you that if you want to go through Transferwise a 6% fee will be added to the invoice, to make up for the "finance operation tax" that occurs on any credit, currency swap or insurance policy transaction.

> Once you sort out the government, the currency is no longer a problem.

One could argue that not even the developed world has "sorted out the government", and you think that Latin America is going to be able to do it? Do you think that continent-sized countries like Brazil or Turkey, with so many different people and different views and conflicting points will be able to "sort it out" through a political system that is set up in a way to not let anyone prosper unless it is submitted to the corrupt elites? Haven't you learned anything from the events of the last 20-30 years?

Why do you think that people should spend their lives trying to fix a so-horribly complex broken system, when they get sidestep the whole problem by disrupting it and searching for a more localized approach?

Sir, you have absolutely no idea what you are talking about. Or worse, you DO and you are actively defending it. Maybe that is the problem. Maybe you are so comfortable in your golden cage that you think it would be silly to work to be free and to be able to fly at will.